Cloudmark Security Blog

All posts by Andrew Conway

Attempting to attribute the Sony Pictures Entertainment attack to North Korea is complicated by the fact that a worm active in that country may be allowing foreign hackers access to computers within North Korea. While there is no evidence computers infected with this worm were involved on the attack on Sony, any attribution based on […]

Not all SMS spam is sent by cyber criminals or con men. Businesses that are too eager to promote their products can often cross the line from legitimate marketing into spam. A company called Optical Express, for example, is one of the most persistent line crossers in the UK. Based on reports to the mobile […]

2014 has seen some interesting developments in computer security and the lack thereof: the growth of encryption based ransomware, the exposure of several highly sophisticated state sponsored cyber espionage malware packages, the takedown of the Silk Road drug sales website (twice), a series of massive credit card breaches from major retail chains in the US, […]

Years ago, when one of my university friends, who later went on to become an academic mathematician, told me his research at Oxford University was being sponsored by the UK’s intelligence agency GCHQ, I asked him what he was working on. “Tests for prime numbers.” “Oh, that’s very relevant to code breaking, isn’t it Richard?” […]

When I heard late last year that Snapchat had turned down an offer of three billion dollars for the company, my first thought was, what sort of person would turn down that sort of money for a company that has never made a profit and has no real model for monetization? It turns out the […]

In August 2013, Ladar Levison shut down Lavabit, a secure email service, after the US Government ordered him to turn over the private key for his company. The FBI had a search warrant to view the mail of a single user, probably Edward Snowden, but Lavabit had been designed so that individual user’s email was […]

Starting on October 28, we saw a new hook used to try and trick users into installing a Trojan on their computer – Free Pizza. Fans of Robert Heinlein will be familiar with the acronym TANSTAAFL – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. In this case TANSTAAFPE – There Ain’t No Such […]

As I reported in a previous post, the hacked SnapChat collection known as the Snappening contains very few nude photos, and most of those do not show an identifiable face. I was asked to quantify this, so I took a random sample of 1,000 photos from the collection and categorized them. To respect the privacy […]

The media are full of reports of a vast leak of private photos and videos that were sent using the SnapChat application. However, it’s looking increasingly likely that they have been taken in by a scammer, and that the actual leak consists of a handful of videos, very few of them compromising. Starting on Thursday, […]

As a fourth wave of stolen celebrity nude photos and videos is being distributed on the Internet, lawyers for some of the affected celebrities are suing Google for making it too easy to find their stolen images. However, the more savvy voyeurs are not using Google to search for the latest leaks, they are simply […]